ISU team wins international data mining competition

Friday, July 11, 2014 10:32 AM

A team of Iowa State University graduate students topped squads from 98 other universities from 28 countries to take first place at the 15th annual Data Mining Cup competition last week in Berlin. It was the first time that an American team has won the competition, which is sponsored by European data mining company Prudsys AG. Teams had six weeks to develop a solution for a data mining problem, and this year the problem was to use an unidentified online store's historical purchase data to create a model for new orders that predicts the probability of the purchase being returned. The Iowa State team was made up Guillermo Basulto-Elias, Fan Cao, Xiaoyue Cheng, Cory Lanker, Ian Mouzon, and Lanfeng Pan out of the statistics department, Jessica Hicks and Xin Yin out of the bioinformatics and computational biology department, and Marius Dragomiroiu out of the computer science department.